If you’re not familiar with Homicide Watch DC, you should check it out. At first it’s interesting [and sad], then it gets engrossing [reality TV that’s not staged], then you start to realize how close and indiscriminate murders happen to where we live or work or play [unless you live west of Rock Creek Park]. Closest murder to where I live? One block

It is, bar none, the best overall coverage of homicides in DC. She has obtained photos for nearly every victim, and tells their stories. She also follows through with court coverage. When I want to know about a homicide in the area, her site is the first place that I turn. It’s an invaluable resource to anyone with an interest in the area. It is also a balm to the friends and family of the deceased who often feel that their loved ones have passed without larger notice. The site’s stated mission is to “Mark every death. Remember every victim. Follow every case.” That is a mission in which I have never seen Laura fall short.

Wednesday, the pair announced they’d keep the site going if they could raise $40,000 on Kickstarter by mid-September. The funding would go toward a one-year project, to teach journalism students how to do crime reporting, using the Homicide Watch platform — which Laura and Chris have tried to license to other publications in various forms; the Nieman blog reports that a deal falling through at the last minute is what prompted the site’s hiatus.

Hopefully DC Homicide Watch will continue with interns, and is raising Kickstarter funds to keep up the good work. So I ask you to chip in what you can, because regardless of it someone is a Georgetown matron or a teenager in Ivy City, their life mattered and their murder should be accounted for.

It was reported yesterday that Homicide Watch D.C., the website that reports every facet of every murder case in the District, will likely go on hiatus next week when its publishers, Laura and Chris Amico, go to Cambridge, Mass. for a Nieman fellowship at Harvard University. That news came as a blow to the Amicos’ fellow journalists, as well as those who rely on Homicide Watch’s deep, compassionate coverage of victims, suspects, investigations and cases. But they said the were planning to launch a Kickstarter campaign to fund a group of reporting interns who can continue their work for the next year while they supervise from afar.

The work that Chris and Laura Amico have done with Homicide Watch have been nothing short of astounding – and when you think about the void that they’re filling, it’s hard not to get emotional about. The crime reporting that they’re doing at Homicide Watch isn’t something that the local outlets are capable of doing. The service that they are doing is worth your support, and their program to train a whole new generation of crime reporters is a worthy effort

Laura Amico and her husband Chris have put a lot of energy into a great project in the Washington DC area — a site, Homicide Watch, that quite literally tracks every reported homicide in the District. It’s grown into a public service that’s drawn hundreds of thousands of pageviews per month and helped keep people aware of stories that would’ve gotten ignored by a traditional newspaper.

The site reached 330,000 readers in June, Chris says. People visited to see photos of the dead, breaking news about murders, dispatches and documents from every court case, and comments from friends and family members. The site became a place where Washingtonians could go to share and mourn.

“I’m not generally a fan of websites,” US Attorney Ronald Machen, DC’s top prosecutor, told The Washingtonian in a February 2012 feature, “but this is different and valuable. Victims of violent crime in Washington, DC, get little or no attention from the major news outlets. People are numb.”

The idling of Homicide Watch says much about how the media values life in the nation’s capital. For the past six months, the Amicos have been trying to find a media or academic partner to keep Homicide Watch alive.

What is Homicide Watch D.C.?

Homicide Watch is a community-driven reporting project covering every murder in the District of Columbia. Using original reporting, court documents, social media, and the help of victims’ and suspects’ friends, family, neighbors and others, we cover every homicide from crime to conviction. Read more…

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What is Homicide Watch D.C.?

Homicide Watch is a community-driven reporting project covering every murder in the District of Columbia. Using original reporting, court documents, social media, and the help of victims’ and suspects’ friends, family, neighbors and others, we cover every homicide from crime to conviction. Read more…